Dear America,
I have been on vacation this past week and I have discovered, much to my chagrin, that Donald Trump is in the news every day in other countries as well as our own. The most recent entries in Trump's hall of shame have been his denunciation of the CIA and virtually all other American intelligence agencies claiming that their suspicions of Russian cyber-manipulation of our election are a Democratic hoax motivated by that party's embarrassment over losing the presidential election to him. But that story was accompanied by his brash acknowledgement of the Taiwanese government despite decades of a "one China policy" in American politics that was propounded by diplomatic professionals in this country out of national interest in geo-political stability. And then there was his rebuke of a labor union president for pointing out that Trump had exaggerated both his role in the Carrier decision not to move some jobs to Mexico, claiming that the union and its president had been remiss, which then led to the Carrier decision to ship those jobs to Mexico in the first place. Of course there is also the most recent one: his decision to nominate yet another billionaire, the CEO of Exxon-Mobil, for Secretary of State, presumably because he has such strong business ties to Russia and Putin's oligarchic inner circle.
I have an in-law who recently said that he couldn't understand why liberals were surprised about what Trump was doing in general, but I held my tongue out of a commitment to family harmony. What I wanted to say, and still do, is that we liberals are not surprised at all. In fact, it seems to me that conservatives like him--he voted for Trump, and adamently admitted that he intended to do so in the run-up to the election when I naively confronted him with the fact that James Comey had never said, despite my in-law's insistance to the contrary, said that anyone other than Hillary Clinton would have been prosecuted for her email debacle (I didn't confront him with the fact that I knew that because I had actually heard Comey's congressional testimony of CSPAN rather than being informed by someone else who, to quote the song, heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend as he had)--are now dismissing Trump as an idiot as if they had never had reason to suspect that Trump was a narcisstic bufoon and an ignorant demagogue of a blatherskite. We liberals aren't surprised at all. We are just filled with apprehension on account of the fact that just what we suspected would...just what we had warned conservatives of...is not coming to pass.
Trump has nominated one Billionaire for Secretary of Education, to decide how our public education system is going to be run, when she has professed not to believe in public education in essence. He has nominated a brain surgeon who once pronounced that the pyramids were actually fuel tanks for aliens to run HUD. His chosen national security advisor is a retired general who tweeted that people should judge for themselves the story of "pizzagate" rather than either saying nothing or just suggesting the profound idiocy of the idea and the nefariousness of the motivation of those who would spread such a hideous and outlandish calumny out of ultra-conservative zeal for power and complete disregard for the truth. His nominee for head of the Treasury is a hedge-fund manager who got rich at Goldman-Sachs and by participating in Romney-style corporation flipping at the expense of workers and the consumers of their products when jobs got shipped overseas in order to enhance profitability with no concern for our economy. Add to those follies portended policies that would result in the end of "Obamacare" and thus of health insurance for about 20 million Americans, a plan to isolate China with tariffs and other punitive economic policies, the practice in his own companies of relying on foreign labor and his entanglements with foreign sovereign investments and you have a recipe for either impeachment, or worse...a nation racing toward the edge of its own destruction with a lunatic at the helm.
When I heard my in-law utter his ill-considered blame-shifting for the catastrophe that is president-elect Donald Trump, I wanted to tell him that I knew what kind of an idiot he was because he didn't find out that Trump is an idiot too, but I didn't. In fact, I probably won't ever say that, though there is plenty of time to do so...although maybe not so much. A disaster that a country votes for usually comes on pretty quick.
Your friend,
Mike
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